Brita's Holiday Village

On the porch of the house by the sea lives a comatose cat. It supposedly belongs to the neighbor, my host told me, but it spends most of its time in a basket on the wooden sofa outside. Every time I come out on the porch it's changed position slightly, nose pointing in a new direction, like a sun dial. I've never actually seen it move.
In between writing shifts, I do a bit of research: this time on archaeology, mines and dead bodies. I'm learning a ton of stuff thanks to archaeologist Ola Kronberg, who helps me dredge up answers to questions like "how does a body decay in a mine?" and "who do you call when you find something ancient?". It turns out there are even more ways to preserve a body than I knew of (and I know of quite a few). Fet-Mats (Fat Mats), for example, was perfectly preserved by copper vitriol in a disused mine shaft. And I'd forgotten how peat bogs preserve skin but dissolve bone (so that bodies found in peat bogs are essentially skin sacks). Might go visit the nearby mine today. There's no other way to find out what it smells like.